A handful of large security vendors last week proposed standards for testing anti-spyware tools, the next step toward the group's goal of making the fight against spyware more like the battle against viruses.

McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, ISCA Labs and Thompson Cyber Security Lab issued the Anti-Spyware Testing Best Practice document in the hope that the recommendations will be adopted by organizations - such as Network World - that test anti-spyware products.

"We sat down with the Anti-Spyware Coalition a year ago to define what spyware is, and this is a natural extension of that," says Vincent Weafer, Symantec's senior director of security response. "We came up with common definitions and have now described effective testing so products can be compared on equal footing."

The proposed standards (see www.spywaretesting.org) are sensible and in line with the tests Network World has done. We published our methodology, started with clean systems, installed selected programs from a test suite, etc. We'll review the full recommendations when we test again this year.

Weafer says the recommendations were created with testing of desktop anti-spyware tools in mind because the complexity is highest there - you need to be able to support protection and remediation in real time - but the core principles apply to all spyware tests. (Network World's latest test concluded that enterprises are better off fighting spyware using gateways because they are easier to administer, insulated from users and don't require remediation.)

The group should be commended for cooperating on spyware definitions and helping to create these testing standards. Both efforts should benefit the buyer. But perhaps the most important part of this announcement is the promise of the companies to lead a collaborative fight against spyware.

According to the release, the plan is to "leverage the participating members' experience in anti-virus research cooperation for threat naming conventions, intelligence-sharing best practices and emergency information distribution."

While anti-virus companies long ago established procedures for sharing information about threats, thus benefiting the industry at large, anti-spyware vendors have largely been going it alone, trying to differentiate themselves on how they recognize and fight spyware.